Search This Blog

Subscribe to this blog

LIKE THIS BLOG? Get the latest post in your email box

The World Health Organization and the Ebola Challenge

Another one of my articles published under my real name on Impakter. I never worked for the WHO but having spent 25 years of my life with another specialized UN agency (FAO), I believe I have an insider's ability to understand what works and what doesn't work in the UN system...

The World Health Organisation and Ebola

Ebola is a perfect example of what is wrong with the World Health Organization.
More and more people have been asking, why is it not present on the
ground? Why didn’t it issue a warning sooner? In short, what is it doing
(if anything)?

With close to 1900 people already dead since the beginning of the outbreak this year, the international medical agency Médecins sans Frontières
(Doctors Without Borders) has warned that “the world is losing the
battle” to contain Ebola and the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization
(FAO) expects severe food shortages in the three countries most
affected by Ebola, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. The hardest-hit of
the three, Liberia, with 694 deaths, has seen the local market price of
the national staple cassava going up 150 percent in August, and that is
only the beginning.

On 8 August, the WHO declared Ebola a “public health emergency”. On 28 August, it issued a “road map”
to combat Ebola – it is intended as a framework to guide operations. At
current infection rates, the WHO fears it could take six to nine months
and at least $490 million (373 million euros) to bring the outbreak
under control, by which time more than 20,000 people could become
infected…And this of course assumes the money will be coming.

Are donors rushing to help? No. Governments, instead of responding,
are quick to put the blame on WHO, or at least imply that WHO plays a
part in the overall slow response of the international community.That’s
not fair.

Popular Posts

In the 40 years I have lived in Rome, I have never seen the city is such bad shape, graffiti vandalizing graceful, ancient buildings everywhere, piles of dirt and s--t on the sidewalks, potholes in the streets, large enough to trap a scooter's wheel and kill the driver.

A friend of mine, Giuseppe Bonanno, in desperation, put up this blog post that I reproduce here - if you read Italian, you'll find it a good, rousing read...though depressing: When will the newly elected Mayor of Rome, Ms. Raggi do something?

And she's so new to the political game (she comes from the 5 Star protest party) and young (just 37), can she defeat "Mafia Capitale" as it is known here, i.e. the incredible corruption that has been linking local politicians to the Mafia for decades and that has led Rome to this final, dramatic juncture?

So far, what she's done is meet with the Pope, here's the video:

Here's Giuseppe Bonanno's blog post, if you want to read this on his blog, …

I just reviewed Steve Case's bestseller, “THE THIRD WAVE – AN ENTREPRENEUR’S VISION OF THE FUTURE” for Impakter Magazine:

When Steve Case’s book came out on 5 April 2016 (publisher: Simon and Schuster), it was an immediate New York Times and Wall Street Journal sensation, hailed as the number one business book of the year.

Part memoir, part business manual, it’s a must read for at least two reasons: one, because it is a unique memoir from someone who was on the leading edge of the Internet revolution: Steve Case was a co-founder of AOL in 1985, the first Internet company to go public (in 1991), the first to bring millions of Americans online; AOL was a corporate giant that arose a full decade before Google, Amazon and Facebook; Case oversaw the Time Warner-AOL merger in 2000 and became chairman of the combined business, the largest media and communications empire in the world at that time.It is clear that any aspiring entrepreneur could learn from Case’s unique insights into the st…

Another one of my articles published on Impakter - I interviewed the founder of Authorea, a startup for scientists to share and advance research. Here is his picture, his name is Alberto Pepe, he's a young Italian astrophysicist who now lives in New York:

And here is the start of the article:

You’d think that writing scientific papers today, with all the digital tools at hand, would be a breeze. But you’d be wrong. Scientific work is not helped along by the Internet but challenged by it.

Why?

Because scientists, for the most part, still follow traditional methods for sharing their research findings. Or, as young Italian astrophysicist Alberto Pepe put it in an interviewwith Il Corriere della Sera, a major Italian daily, “Scientists today produce 21st century research; they use the writing tools of the 20th century and force their writing into formats similar to those of the 18th century.”

In short, the way scientific articles are written goes back 400 years, and the ability to sha…